When people think of risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI), Hollywood looms large. Movies have long conjured the worst case scenarios: from Hal refusing to open the pod bay doors in 2001, to a murderous Arnold Schwarzenegger travelling back through time. If there is a robot apocalypse, however, it is unlikely to resemble a Terminator movie. A more probable scenario is what we see off-screen in – ironically enough – the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike.

Hollywood’s scriptwriters are protesting, in part, about the threat of jobs being replaced by ChatGPT or some other large language model (LLM). But is this just an effort to protect jobs from competition? Or does generative AI truly threaten the sustainability of the creative arts and the knowledge economy more generally?